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This volume looks at the influence of the decisions of law courts on the development of the substantive law across Europe in the early modern period. Did law courts contribute to the development of the law? Were their decisions considered to be authoritative even beyond the specific cases on which they were rendered? If so, was such authority given by the pronouncement of the court itself or by its wide use and circulation among both legal practitioners and judges? These difficult questions, typically ducked by scholars, lie at the core of this book, which seeks to provide a critical and stimulating overview of the role of early modern law courts in the complex transition from the late Middle Ages to the modern period.

This book sets a new trajectory for considering the intertwined relationship between theology and law. Through close readings of a range of popular Hollywood speculative fiction films—Shyamalan’s Unbreakable, Snyder’s Man of Steel, Lucas’s and Disney’s Star Wars, Nolan’s The Dark Knight & The Dark Knight Rises, Proyas’ I, Robot, Nolfi’s The Adjustment Bureau and Jackson’s The Hobbit—Timothy Peters explores how fictional worlds, particularly those that ‘make strange’ the world of the viewer, can render visible and make explicit the otherwise opaque theologies of modern law. The book offers a key contribution to the fields of cultural legal studies, law and film and law and theology by considering speculative fiction (superheroes, science fiction, fantasy) as a way of revealing the theologies of modern law and legal theory. The overall narrative of the work marks a course from antagonism to reconciliation, from autonomy to reciprocity and from law to love. Throughout the work, the book draws on resources within the Christian theological tradition’s critical engagement with law, as a means for rethinking and reimagining our post-secular legal modernity—enabling both a deactivating and fulfilling of the law. In exploring speculative film’s estranged accounts of the mythos of modernity and modern law, it articulates an alternative theological jurisprudence based on a love that takes us beyond the law.